With the Christmas holiday looming, you need a plan to fill the yawning days when there’s no school and the rain is hammering down.

Christmas crafts are an obvious choice. Most of these use materials you are likely to have on hand anyway and take less than half an hour to make.

Not only will it keep the kids out of harm’s way, but your house will benefit from the festive cheer of having glitter glue sliding down the walls and splashes of red and green paint on the furniture. Enjoy!

Filter snowflakes

You probably made these at school from a circle of white paper, but in the age of ubiquitous coffee machines, you can use a white coffee filter instead. Fold it in half, then quarters, then eighths. It should look like a narrow triangle now. Using a pair of kid-safe scissors, get your little darlings to cut small triangles into the sides all the way down from the point to the bottom. When you open it up, voilà, you will have a snowflake of sorts. Slather with glitter glue, and hang from a piece of cotton. Repeat until they run amok with the safety scissors.

With a Yo Ho Ho and a painty hand

Forget overpriced (or even cheap and nasty) Christmas cards; nothing says “I really did stir myself to make something for you” more than a handmade card.

Your house will benefit from the festive cheer of having glitter glue sliding down the walls and splashes of red and green paint on the furniture

Take a piece of green card and fold it into the appropriate Christmas card shape. The centrepiece is going to be a white child’s handprint, done upside down. This forms Santa’s beard. Above it, stick (or draw) two googly eyes, one large red nose and two chapped pink cheeks. Create the red-robed-one’s hair by gluing on cotton wool. A smear of red paint will form his hat, with another cotton wool blob for the bobble on the end. Simplicity itself, but a brilliant effect!

Chrimbo lanterns

This is a wonderfully easy idea for a really impressive look and it recycles your glass jars too.

Take a clean glass jar and measure out some tinfoil to wrap around it. Put the tinfoil onto a towel on a hard surface (which you don’t mind perhaps being accidentally pricked) and, using a pencil tip, carefully push holes into the tinfoil to create a design. You can go freestyle, create a picture or even prick out a letter.

Next, wrap the foil around the jar and tape it at the back. Put a tea light into the jar and the light will glow through the holes. More advanced users could create several lanterns to spell out a word like Xmas or Love.

Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree

Making Christmas lanterns is easier than it looks.

To make a unique set of kid decorations for the Christmas table, you’ll need to filch a few green paint sampler swatches from the DIY store. You need the ones that are a long, thin rectangle with different shades of the paint on. Snip two swatches into a triangle shape to form the tree. Glue a twig behind one swatch to form the trunk; then glue the other swatch back to back so that both sides look like a tree. Two silver star stickers on the top complete the look. After you’ve made a few, stand them up in a glass jar of ‘snow’ (use sand or flour).

You can also use the same technique to make a Christmas card, by gluing the swatch onto the card instead.

Cut out the stars

Collect a few of the disposable pie trays that come with quiche or pies, or hang onto an old aluminium baking tray at home. Have your child draw the outline of a moon and several large stars on them; then cut out the shapes. They can decorate them by pricking or scratching the aluminium with a large nail. Then simply make a hole at the top and hang the decorations from the tree or onthe wall.

Sponging at Christmas

Make your own wrapping paper with a sponge and those reams of brown paper that you get in the box when your order from Amazon (in the absence of the brown paper, ask an architect friend for some recycled blueprints; they print out hundreds and most go in the bin).

Then you need a few sponges of different sizes in squares or rectangles. Squirt some paint onto a tray and have your child dip the sponge in it until covered in paint. They should then plonk it on the paper and ‘freeze’ (this stops them smearing it everywhere). Repeat using different colours until you have lots of squares and rectangles all along the roll. Have them add present trimmings by gluing string or ribbon onto the parcels once the paint has dried. Spread Christmas cheer by scattering the paper with red and green glitter; the lucky gift recipient will be vacuuming it out of the rugs for weeks.

The sock monster

If you’ve been wondering what to do with all those cute little kid socks that end up lurking in the laundry basket having lost their partner, try this craft (it is also a nifty way to get rid of all your Halloween sweets).

Take a piece of string and hang it horizontally along the wall between two nails (as if you wanted to hang up Christmas cards). Get your children to number wooden clothes pegs from one to 25. They can also decorate each peg using felt tips and whatever else is on hand (more glitter glue). Then stuff 25 little socks with a treat (if you have more than one child, stuff two or more treats per sock). Each day of December, the kids can pick the right number (you need not put the pegs in order to make it more fun to find them) and collect their Advent sweet. And if you’re trying to reduce your sugar intake, switch the sweets for little toys, tickets to the cinema, stickers and so on.